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Ever wanted to live inside an Elizabeth Taylor movie? Soon, you ll be able to really picture yourself there.
From Feb. 11 to March 21, the Bass Concert Hall stage will turn into a gallery of historic film backdrops from the golden age of Hollywood. The show, Behind the Scenes: The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop, is the first time that 12 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio assets will be available to view by the public.
The hand-painted pieces, which once transported screen stars to far-off vistas through the magic of illusion, were donated to the University of Texas through the Art Director’s Guild Archives and their Backdrop Recovery Project, which is an effort to preserve the legacy of Hollywood’s motion picture scenic artists, according to a news release. The project is touted as creating the most comprehensive archive of Hollywood scenic art history. UT s Texas Performing Arts holds 50 MGM backdrops, which are used for educational purposes.
Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus
Credit: Alamy
In a monastery halfway up the Himalayas, in the summer of 1946, a young Englishwoman pulled a gun on her married lover.
“It was a revolver, a big one, US army issue, and it was loaded,” Black Narcissus director Michael Powell would later write of his snow-capped showdown with paramour Kathleen Byron. “A naked woman and a loaded gun are persuasive objects, and I have always thought that I deserved congratulations for talking myself out of that one.”
The story may not be quite as scandalous as it initially sounds. Firstly, while Black Narcissus was set in craggier reaches of British India, it was actually filmed at Pinewood Studios, and at the West Sussex address of an Indian army retiree (whose garden contained geographically appropriate flora). And it is unclear whether the firearm was aimed at Powell during the shoot or afterwards.